


Under Pressure

by KittyViolet



Category: New Mutants (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Atlantis, Chastity Device, Diving, F/F, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Swimming, Tail Sex, Teasing, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 14:10:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20743484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: Kitty closes her eyes. She's sure they'll try that again.





	Under Pressure

“I’m not wearing that,” Illyana says.

“Why not?”

“It’s ugly and uncomfortable and the vest chafes. And whatever those rubber tight pants are supposed to do I can cast a spell and do that instead.”

“Which won’t help Shark-Girl.”

“Iara.”

“I know. Pronounced Yara, right?”

Illyana is exceptionally sensitive when kids aren’t called by their right names. “Iara. She told me she prefers it to her code name.”

“She told me,” Kitty says, “that she can’t breathe on land for more than an hour a day anymore, and she specifically needs salt water. So either we move the school to P-town—“

“—which sounds great except for the winters—“

“—or one of us goes to the west outpost of New Atlantis and picks up one of their air-breathing collars. With their permission.”

“I can go there through Limbo in five minutes and come back with what Iara needs. Remind me again why I’m supposed to wear my own weight in rubber instead?” Illyana is fiddling with the pants and their wires; Kitty helps her pull them up.

“If I wanted a collar stolen I’d send Gambit. But then we’d have to fight a stupid war as the Atlanteans came to get their property back. It’s better to ask. Politely, following their protocols. The west outpost is about two hours away by propellant-driven diving suit. No vehicles for a supplicant. Those are their rules. They are a highly militarized society that has survived multiple attempts to crush them, with about twenty degrees of politeness rules than only Sage and Emma understand.”

“So send Sage or Emma. Can you re-zip this?” The rubberized back of the pressure suit clings to Illyana’s spine; it’s almost zipped up around her shoulder blade. On her pale skin , Kitty thinks, it looks at once sexy and ridiculous. The suit’s contours smooth out, and amplify, every muscle, every curve.

“We can’t send Sage because she’s currently the entirety of the air traffic control system for New Zealand, Tonga, Tuvalu and Samoa, and we can’t send Emma because she’s Namor’s ex. I think you were there for that caper.” 

Kitty adjusts the siphons on Illyana’s hips, then reaches to pull the final wires over her best friend’s thighs. 

“Also they’ve got all those wards against transportation magic. We need an X-person tough enough to get there without using magic, articulate enough to explain why a mutant on land needs one of those collars, diplomatic enough to take it if offered, and tough enough to get out fast if they say no. You can use all your powers inside, if they threaten you. But you need to go there as a supplicant, apparently unarmed, and since it’s too deep for a quiet approach in a sub, we’re going to use this hyper-pressure suit. It doesn’t need oxygen tanks—it’s like having gills. Shuri sent me the specs last week.”

“Taking a dive for the team, I guess.” Illyana shrugs and traces the inside of Kitty’s jeans shorts with her gloved finger.

“That’s an idiom I’ve never heard you use,” Kitty answers. She shivers a little, in a good way.

“Never needed it before. Am I ready now?”

Spools and tubes of rubbery pressure material, designed to keep her insides safe from the crushing weight of the ocean a mile down, slip over Illyana’s arms. Kitty admits that she kind of likes zipping and curling this stuff around Illyana’s body: around her shoulders, around her knees, around her thighs and sides, up to her chin—she kisses her friend on the chin, on the lips, on the nose—and up to cover her face, with a breathing apparatus now attached.

Kitty fastens and checks and ties and pushes and pulls till her friend looks, from an engineering perspective, almost ready to go.

“I am so not ready to go,” Illyana shrugs.

“Why not? Shark Girl is counting on her teachers here.”

“I can’t figure out how to make this thing move in the direction I want it to go. There are servos inside it and it’s not like sword-fighting or dancing. It’s not intuitive.”

“Right.” Then Illyana punches her best friend in the nose.

“See? I didn’t mean that.”

Kitty has been testing the mission suit for a couple of days, even since Shark Girl made her needs known; Kitty knows how to bend the elbows to propel herself right, how to bend the knees to go up or down, how to keep the rubbery fabric behind her from bunching and pinching her between the butt cheeks. She did not want to expose Illyana to the indignity and tedium of beta tests on the new deep-ocean, trip-to-Atlantis pressure suit. Oops.

Magik spontaneously falls on the tile floor, bringing herself up just in time to avoid a head-tile collision. “This is not my thing,” she says.

Illyana’s beautiful hair, her severe bangs and panels of straight blond light, are the only part of her body that Kitty can see: everything else is inside the suit.

“There’s a servo if you just flex your knees—look, I’ll show you.” Kitty phases into the suit so that she’s overlapping with Illyana’s body, almost entirely within the body, avoiding the electronics in the joints. Because Illyana is stronger and bigger than Kitty, Kitty’s body fits entirely inside her best friend’s, like a Russian doll, without touching the suit itself.

“That feels nice,” Illyana says. Kitty can hear how the words sound to Illyana, because Kitty’s ears are inside Illyana’s head.

“Can you feel what I’m doing? Knees slightly left,” Kitty whispers—she can choose to be audible even when intangible, as long as she has air to breathe, which the suit provides, and that oddity of mutant physiology has saved her more than once. Illyana can indeed hear; the leg moves left.

“Jump over that stack of books.” Illyana and Kitty jump together. “Now take one hand in the other hand.” A mechanism whirrs. Illyana, and Kitty inside her, holds hands with herself.

“I like this.” Illyana feels almost ticklish, like someone’s aware of her whole frame, her every moment, sharing them with her, so that she doesn’t even have to say how she feels: Kitty knows what’s relaxed, what’s tense, what has to move left, what’s stretched and what’s too tight, what’s…. wetter than it was before.

“I like this a lot,” says Kitty, who isn’t sure whether she’s wearing Illyana or Illyana’s wearing her. They’re both wearing the pressure suit. It’s like a weighted blanket and a vibrator and a cuddly snowsuit made friends, and Illyana was the friend. Kitty closes her eyes and then remembers that she’s supposed to be helping Illyana move deliberately, purposefully, through what’s going to be, like, four atmospheres, down in the western New Atlantean trench. She’ll have to stay focused. But mmmmm.

“Kitty?”

“Ilya?” She thinks her best friend’s going to scold her.

“Why don’t you come with me on the mission? Faster than teaching me how to wear and use this suit without you. Plus, it will be another spontaneous vacation together. Like New Orleans.”

“Let me check my calendar.” Kitty is still inside Magik inside the suit. There is no screen, no book, no calendar to check. “In case I wasn’t clear on that: you’re on.”

*

The next morning Kitty and Illyana meet in the downstairs changing room, used for swimsuits and spacesuits and sweaty assignations. Kitty has the whole high-tech pressure suit for Illyana in its carrying case, to be donned and zipped and tightened and fastened around her before she gets dropped into Long Island Sound with her best friend immaterial inside her. 

Illyana has a canvas bag. “I’ll put that on,” she says. “You put this on.” Magik, smiling broadly, her natural nails gleaming, reaches into the bag and pulls out another, softer bag, and out of that bag she fishes a kind of shiny pink harness-snorkel device, like a muzzle for a lion cub, with extra straps running down the side.

“What is that and why should I put it on?”

“I noticed that you were getting a little distracted when you should have been giving me directions yesterday. If I’m going to drive this thing all the way to Atlantis I’ll need my navigator to stay on track. So I got you this lovely device, which prevents you from touching yourself where you might otherwise be tempted to touch yourself.”

The idea of wearing Illyana’s device—a muzzle? a soft lock? What should Kitty call it?—appeals to the American girl very deeply, very mysteriously. Maybe she’s wanted something like that for years. Maybe it can protect her from some feelings that even now run deeper and get more unpredictable than she can say. Maybe it stokes those feelings instead. The only way to find out is to put it on.

Kitty unzips her jeans, leaving her underwear and her sky-blue button-down tunic on, and steps right into the device, which Illyana locks up with a tiny black-and-white key, and then another key. “You have to turn both keys to unlock the device.”

“When will that happen?”

“When we’ve completed our mission. When you’ve been able to give me the best directions. When we get the collar.” Illyana pauses and stares right into Kitty’s green, wide-open eyes. “When you’re good.”

“What if I just phase through it?”

“Try it.” She can’t. There’s a circuit she can’t disrupt. It phases along with her, like clothing, but she can no more phase out of it than she can phase away from her own fingers and toes.

The device feels comfortable around Kitty’s hips, so comfortable she can forget that Illyana just locked it. 

*

Laura drops them off at the Northport shoreline, on a stretch of deserted beach. Kitty slips inside her bigger, stronger friend as soon as the jeep goes away, and both of them wade in the water.

Once they’re fully submerged and at full speed the suit works like a jetpack; when they slow down it’s more like a conventional submersible, or maybe a hang glider you can steer. They head through frond after frond near the shore, through thousands of unidentifiable fish, through sharp rocks, through booming sheets of water over water that could be the backwash and fallout from whales. 

“Second gear elbow left,” Kitty whispers. “Third tube for pressure change. Going down. Level out.” There’s nobody else except Ororo that Illyana would volunteer to take directions from.

“Sharp right! Pressure up 1. Now pressure down 3. Down 4. Left heel backward to avoid the sharp rocks. You’re about to hit that thing that looks like a squid. Swivel down. Right. Go slow….. OK, we're through. Should be a clear path from here out.”

Inhabited Atlantis—the new, rebuilt Atlantis—is maybe an hour away at this speed. The water’s nearly totally dark, and the direction’s finally set. 

Kitty closes her eyes and loses herself in the rush of water around Illyana’s body, in Illyana herself. Her heels, her calves, her thighs. The small of her back. The flow of her blood. Her buoyancy. Her breasts. Her clavicle. The shape of her jaw. Her breathing. 

Kitty gets lost in the girl she loves, the intangible inside the tangible. Her own breathing speeds up. Her clit is literally inside Illyana’s opening. Their tongues meet. They’re tangled up as they never could be just on beds and in sheets. She’s—she’s—Illyana must know how Kitty feels right now. Illyana must hear her best girl breathe. But Illyana has to keep her own eyes open inside the suit. The lovely suit that presses so close, that keeps her best girl, her Magik, her defender safe from the crushing pressure of the beautiful water. It’s all so exciting that Kitty wants to take her immaterial hand and touch her immaterial—

\--but of course she can’t. There’s a device in the way.

“You knew this would happen,” the phasing mutant whispers.

“I had my suspicions,” Illyana says. “No touching. You are not allowed to touch yourself, do you hear?”

“I want to touch myself,” Kitty says. “But I can’t.”

“You’re not allowed. You’ll be a good girl and not a naughty girl till we’re finished with our mission.”

“You’ve always been the naughty one, haven’t you?” Kitty replied, and closes her eyes, and breathes hard. She keeps on breathing that way, taking full advantage of the air in the gills in the suit, breathing in tandem with Illyana, slowly, happily, right on the edge, so that she knows she would touch herself if she could, but she can’t, enjoying the push and pull of the water around her, all the way to the coral gate.

*

“Boots forward and only then down. Second toggle,” Kitty says. “That’s it.” Illyana, with Kitty still inside her, comes to a halt in front of the palace guard, who switches their trident from hand to hand. The guard’s blue skin shines under dim lights.

“We come on a humanitarian mission,” Illyana says, speaking in English through her mask, following the script they both memorized, “to do honor to Namor and to the ancestors and in the spirit of Qua Ora, the divinity of charity and hospitality, seeking the use on land of an Atlantean treasure. To whom shall protocol direct us now?”

Bubbles bounces off the pressure suit as the guard invites them inside, down a hallway, into a massive pearlescent dome. Illyana and Kitty kneel before a green figure in a sleeveless top, perhaps their own age, with an undercut. 

“You are from the X-Men!” the figure says. “I am La Ji Namorova. I am honestly a fan. I have read much about you. Do you need something from our stores?”

“We wish to communicate about one of our own—oh, you know what, this is way more formal than we need to be,” Illyana ad libs. “We have a student at our school, code name Shark Girl, who used to be able to breathe on land and in water, like your king, but now that she’s older she’s losing the ability and we would like to be able to borrow one of your air-breathing collars, the ones you wear when you go on land, until we can find a better solution.”

“We don not have those,” La Ji says. And then: “But we can send for them. Are you Illyana? I love your adventures. Our sorcerer scribes write them down. Did you come on your own?”

“Yes. No.” Kitty can’t take it. She wriggles out of Illyana, sad to separate herself from her friend in any way, still so turned-on by the trip that she finds it hard to concentrate on anything else. She wants to touch herself. She won’t. She can’t.

“Are you an air-dweller too? Wait, are you Pryde, of the X-Men?”

Kitty blushes. She’s still intangible, of course. She’s still underwater. The Atlantean halls are all water-filled for water breathers. She’ll have to get back inside Illyana, sharing Illyana’s suit’s air supply, before she runs out of oxygen: phasing gives her more time but not much.

“The air-breather collars, we have them, but they are in the Eastern warehouse district of New Atlantis, half a day by coral rail. We do not mass produce, our society does not. We have a guest house that we can fill with air if required. Why do not you both stay overnight?”

Kitty nods. Illyana nods. They’re not exactly packed for an overnight stay, but so what? They can still get back in time for dinner tomorrow, and there are no classes tomorrow: it’s Saturday, and they can wait here till they get what Iara needs.

“But we must fit the girl to the collar. You must bring Iara here once the collar arrives.”

Kitty nods. “We can do that.” She mentally pings the telepath on duty and then waits for a reply. –New Atlanteans friendly. Send Iara for fitting.

The telepath is Rachel. –Kitty? What are you doing down there?

*

The bedroom, once the water’s been pumped out, looks like the inside of an oyster: irregular, shiny, beautiful, with crushed fabric piled in corners for chairs and beds. There’s a dish of something crumbled and pungent and white on one of the chairs, a set of actual oysters laid out from smallest to largest on a low table, a lush pale green bedstead. 

Illyana strips, very carefully, and lays the wire-and-rubber mask and headpiece and top and rubbery pants and boots from the suit out flat on the floor at one end of the oyster-shaped room. She’s nearly naked. She has to be naked. They didn’t bring changes of clothes.

Kitty strips until she’s wearing nothing but the device, checks the bedside tray for mint paste and a toothbrush (which the Atlanteans have provided), then smiles and picks up the dish.

Two minutes later, Illyana looks back at her friend. “You ate it all,” she says.

“Gefilte fish,” Kitty says. “In my experience, no one else likes it.”

“You could have let me try it.”

“I’d rather feed you one of these.” She holds out an oyster, and then another oyster.

“Cliché.”

“Cliché means clench,” Kitty says. “As in tightly held together. As in I’m feeling a little tightly wound right now.” She nods.

“Tell me how it feels,” Illyana says.

“Like being engulfed. Like feeling every nerve of you in every nerve of me.” Kitty pauses. “Like I can feel your shoulders and your lips and your eyelids and your clit expanding and you, changing and growing, and your muscles getting hard around you and I want to touch myself so bad, Illyana, touch me or let me touch myself, I want to touch myself so bad, I’ve been thinking of you and feeling you and immersed in you, overwhelmed with you, pelagic with you,” she’s pleading, she’s using big words, Kitty does that when she’s turned on so hard, the vocabulary just spills out of her—

Illyana smiles. “I forgot the keys.”

Kitty throbs even harder at this point. She’s been inside her friend for so long, and now she’s watching her friend lounge inside a pearly shell, perfectly safe, eating oysters, naked. She’s never wanted to come and not come so badly for so long in her whole life.

“You forgot,” Kitty says, “the keys. You knew why you wanted me to wear this lovely device and then you forgot the keys.”

“I didn’t ask you to speak,” Illyana says, raising her eyebrows, making the whole dilemma into a game.

Kitty bows her head.

“Kneel!” Illyana says, playfully, and there, between her bare legs, there’s that tail. 

Kitty approaches her friend and kneels and the tail wraps around, tickles, teases Kitty on her bare shoulders, around her knees, around her waist. Kitty vibrates inside, shivers hard.

“Kneel harder!” Ilya says. “Now reach up and hold my tail! Now… lick my tail!”

It’s not something they’ve ever done before. And it’s… delightful. Ilya’s tail, now fully manifest, slinks out from her body, an inch or more thick, curled, longer than her arm. Kitty laps and laps the edge of the tail with her tongue, the wedge-tip of the tail with her tongue, enthusiastic, devoted, submissive, her eyes wide open and looking up at Illyana, her labia throbbing inside her locked device. 

Safe in their oyster shell, in their bubble of air, in their guest house, Kitty licks until her tongue gives out and then touches Illyana’s tail, the end of her tail, with her fingertips, first dancing with her fingers, lightly, one at a time, on the end of the tail, then taking the tail in her hand, moving her moistened palm up and down on it while the shaft sways below the tail-end and Illyana's eyes open and close and open and close, the shaft of her tail makes figure eights, and Kitty, throbbing inside the locked devices, kisses it with her lips and then dances with her fingers and closes her palm around it again and strokes with her whole hand-- 

Ilya’s legs open and Ilya falls backwards onto the bed and her legs close and she comes and comes again, like invisible lightning. Her tail thrashes happily. She wraps and warps the seaweed-covered coverlet over herself and curls up and closes her eyes and comes again, her tail sticking out of the blanket as Kitty returns to it, now that Ilya lies on her back, licking it slowly, slowly this time.

“I’ve been inside you all day,” Kitty says, “because you wanted it that way.”

“I want what I want,” Illyana says, still in the space made by their teasing game. “And I want you to come. Now. Come!”

Kitty closes her eyes and still can’t touch herself. She falls forward onto the bedclothes, onto the bed, onto Magik, into Magik. “I want you to lose control now. You’ve had so much control. Now lose it all.” And Kitty does, shaking, phasing through, closing her eyes. But the device is still on. She thinks about her girlfriend, their first time, the first time she phased through the bed, their first time outdoors, their first swimming pool, their time apart, their momentous collision, the games they played with Grey, their, their—

Now Kitty’s over the edge, and she disarticulates herself from Illyana and tosses her own dark curly hair back. She’s sweaty. a little. She’s shaking hard. After half a day inside Illyana, unable to touch herself, absorbing her best girl’s motions, Kitty can come as hard as ever even though she still can’t touch herself and neither can Ilya. She’s still vibrating. She’s spent. 

She spreads her legs and takes Illyana’s hand and they know that in the morning they’ll get what they came for and go home, because Atlantis keeps its word, and the word today is be our guests for the night and go home with the collar tomorrow. The lovers talk about coral and schools of fish and powers and physics and minerals and gossip from their New Mutants days and whether their first professor is still a jerk (yes) and whether they’d ever live on Mars (maybe) and Lila Cheney vs Dazzler vs Laura Jane Grace vs Halsey, whose tenth album just came out (Illyana prefers Angel Haze to them all) and now they’re actually sleepy.

“A little uncomfortable,” Kitty admits, rotating her hips around her device.

“Oh, sorry,” Illyana says. “Ash’f’lith abar terapanu’ih!”

The device opens neatly, as if she had picked a lock.

“You could have done that at any time,” Kitty says.

“I could have done that at any time,” Illyana says. “But wasn’t this way more fun?”

Kitty closes her eyes. She’s sure they’ll try that again.

*

Shark Girl arrives at 0900 hours the next morning, happy to breathe the salt water down there, chatting away in a mix of English and unintelligible Portuguese (intelligible to Fa Ji, who can speak it). 

Illyana is back in her pressure suit. Kitty is back in Illyana. Rachel has the telepathic link working live, so that she can watch Iara get fitted. It’s like a bra fitting, Kitty thinks. All hooks and measurements and fuss and seaweed. Except for the seaweed. When the collar’s all set, they’ll swim slowly up to the surface with Iara, and then Warren will pick them up in his yacht.

\--Collar. Custom restraints, Rachel thinks at Kitty. --Wouldn’t be the first time.

Kitty thinks back at Rachel. --You have no idea.

There’s a game for the three of them, once Illyana swims home.


End file.
